Occupy Wall Street

[BrentMusburger]

You seem to use competition as a synonym for survival. And "Survival of the fittest" certainly has an agressive tone, but it is commonly misunderstood and misinterpreted. You and I do not compete against the natural world, If we want to champion competition as the pure and glorious truth of human living

Perhaps I should make myself more clear. I refer to competition with yourself. My I beleif is that one should constantly be working to improve yourself personally and professionally. Basically, remain self aware enough to be able to evaluate yourself and make the nessasary adjustments. If you do this, you will constantly getting better. I never worry about what other people can or cannot do. I worry about what I can do or can learn to do.

At both of my office jobs I have worked with all women, and I definately am a nice/shy//emotional/caring person. I cannot stand the "guy" champion attitude and working to stomp down others. That is not at all what I meant.

In fact, I would agree with you about cooperation. I was taught all about it in the dozens of teams that I worked with throughout business school. I learned from my mentors (the MBA and CPA) that PEOPLE come first. You can be as smart hell, but guess what? We're all smart. My teams will have people who are positive to be around and help the GROUP succeed. I will not let bad people be in my life.

One of my other quotes I live by is:
"The Brick walls are there for a reason. They're not there to keep up out but rather to give us an opportunity to prove how badly we want something."

I worked incredibly hard, but there were (many) people who helped me over my brick walls. Of course, we can't always pay these people back, but we can pay it forward and help other people achieve their dreams. Someday I intend to be in position to be able to help people get to where they want to be just like I was.

So if we should follow your advice and "not ever let anyone tell you that you cannot do something" then we really shouldn't listen to anything you say about how 'life is' right? Because if we want a different world, then we should go get it. Period.

Sure, if you want to pick apart a motivational quote. It simply means to not let someone else ever discourage you from becoming what you want to be.

The place where your belief falls short is when you accept this human system as 'the way things are'. But america and the american system are not real things, they are cooperative values we (humans) accept and follow.

When in Rome act like the Romans.

And what I see from these occupy protests, or tea party protests, or arab spring protests, is a monumental gaze being leveled at those very institutions and values that have spent a long time casting themselves as 'natural' and 'right' and 'good' and 'immovable'; those values and institutions you seem to consider axiomatic of the American Way. But they are all fantasy, and what we're seeing happen across this planet is a slow recognition of the edges of that fantasy.

Where were these protests during the boom years against these "evil" institutions and horrible ideas? Surely, they've always been "greedy and evil"? Only when the bust comes and it stops working for these people do they become angered. When the economy eventually rebounds, as it always does(it might never get back to the irrational highs of the 90's), they will be right back on the bandwagon.

A lesson I learned, is to never feel sorry about where you are and blame others. The only thing that will change it is action. Always trend towards where you want to be. Their time could be better spend pursuing job opportunities, networking, improving their skill sets, volunteering, starting their own business, ect. Basically, competeing with themselves to get better every day.

What positive comes what they're doing? Maybe if they bring down the banks, wallstreet, and corporate America.....we can live like Africa and then they can REALLY have something to complain about. Be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.

The fact is households are cutting back on their budgets because it's what's in their best interest. Corporations must also cut back in the same way. These two cycles and the liquidation and payment down on debt create a deflationary spiral. It's better to cut 5,000 jobs and stabalize a company rather than doing nothing and losing all 70,000 of them, wouldn't you agree? Or are these individual households going out and expanding their expenditures for no reason as well? If you owned a business, would you just start hiring people, buying more inventory, and building factories.....just because?

[Sym]

Competition with yourself is great, a good motivating tool. But we're not really describing some kind of inner-fire, pump-up-the-volume motivation to wake up and approach the day. We aren't worried about finding the will to scale your 'brick walls' when we encounter them. It's finding a wall that doesn't have someone standing on the top of it kicking everyone else who get close in the face. It's that the brick walls all seem to have been claimed or built by others who--somehow--got to the top first but are now keeping everyone else away. Is it any surprise then that people start looking for ways to dismantle these walls instead of scale them? I mean it's not like they sprung up from the ground naturally. Brick walls are built.

And that cooperative spirit you describe is fantastic, why weren't you describing it earlier? Why did you focus on talking about the welfare-**** and lazy-good-for-nothings? These hypothetical straw-men and personal anecdotes don't seem to--at all--represent the "pay it forward" attitude you're stating as your goal. And the reason i pick apart your motivational quotes is because they can already be applied to the class of people who you seem to think need them. If the things you state as being important to you are actually the case, then you could easily find many commonalities with any of these protestors. The claims you make against them are paper-thin, and the arguments you bring in favor of your view are not that far from theirs if you're willing to think laterally.

To draw issue against these protests because they didn't happen during the 'boom years'(although they did, albeit in different forms and against different groups - G8/G20 meetings) is a red herring. But i'll bite that fish for a moment, if only to illustrate another point I see from these protests. That being we bought into the bull that those people at the top, whether in business or government, were super-smart, super-capable, and super-aware. We thought they were supermen and women and now we see that--not only are they not superheros--they're not heros at all. They're just people. And yet by many accounts they've been treated as an entirely different class of humanity in the aftermath of this. If a man lied about the risk inherent in a loan he wanted from the bank, the system we have in place would charge him with jail time and fines. But when an institution and its officers effectively lie about the risk inherent in CDO's and CDS's (just as an example), there's not a single thing for the system to do besides SUBSIDIZE it???

That's not a personal problem. That's a systemic one. So I don't see the issue being that we've got hard times, it's that we've got hard times and those individuals and institutions in place who facilitated these hard times were able to do so without much more than a stern warning. A system like that invites protest. And so we see them; tea party vs the government sector, OWS vs the financial sector. So to talk about competition internally, or overcoming obstacles, or creating opportunities oneself is really to both miss a number of important points inherent in these protests as well as to miss out on an opportunity to meet likeminded people in many other aspects.

[`NG]

This thread has turned into occupy 1911.

[ward]

Reference this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Hippie,_Die <---- South Park episode.

[sp_hippies][/sp_hippies]

[james-]

Ward just owned this thread.

/close

[BrentMusburger]

And that cooperative spirit you describe is fantastic, why weren't you describing it earlier? Why did you focus on talking about the welfare-**** and lazy-good-for-nothings? These hypothetical straw-men and personal anecdotes don't seem to--at all--represent the "pay it forward" attitude you're stating as your goal. And the reason i pick apart your motivational quotes is because they can already be applied to the class of people who you seem to think need them. If the things you state as being important to you are actually the case, then you could easily find many commonalities with any of these protestors.

I'd be lying if I said I was objective in my stance. I absolutely have a layer of resentment and disgust.

I've seen people buy pop with food stamp money so they could pour it out onto the ground, and take the 10 cent cans back to buy beer. People who have zero respect for others or property. People so lazy that they pee in two liters instead of getting up to use the bathroom. People who woke up past noon every day. People who called me a "spoiled know nothing college kid" or said all I did was "drive around all day"---yeah to get to the place on the complex to serve you people. Drugs. Stealing. Prostitution. Lying. Selling the scooter they got from the government that they "needed". Big screen tv's. Daily casino trips. "I can say what ever I want to say to you because I pay your salary"---had I been a little older and a little wiser, I may have shot back with a "I pay my own salary as a worker here, and actually pay for you to still be able to exist".

At the risk of sounding agressive, who are you to tell me who my efforts of paying it forward should go to? If I find it personally rewarding to find ambitious, hardworking people where I can "see myself at that age", where am I wrong to help them get to where they have a strong desire to be? It wouldn't make me happy to help people that don't appreciate it in my opinion. I'll put my time and effort where I see fit.

If a man lied about the risk inherent in a loan he wanted from the bank, the system we have in place would charge him with jail time and fines. But when an institution and its officers effectively lie about the risk inherent in CDO's and CDS's (just as an example), there's not a single thing for the system to do besides SUBSIDIZE it???

Did they lie? Or did people accept things that they didn't understand simply because they wanted to live beyond their means? The teaser rates on ARM loans were one of the major issues. Buy a house now at 7% interest and then in three years the interest rate and payment spikes. Whose fault is it for signing this?

I'll say again, the banks had to be bailed out BECAUSE housing for people who couldn't afford it was subsidized, then those people defaulted in mass because of their overabundant lifestyle, and the banks had to be "bailed out" to save the system---the system brought down by the taxpayer living on borrowed time and money.

We aren't worried about finding the will to scale your 'brick walls' when we encounter them. It's finding a wall that doesn't have someone standing on the top of it kicking everyone else who get close in the face. It's that the brick walls all seem to have been claimed or built by others who--somehow--got to the top first but are now keeping everyone else away.

Where were the people to kick me off the wall? Why did partners, managers, and seniors let me into their exclusive world? I didn't know anybody. I don't have money. I'm a nobody. I started at a job lower than fast food. Where was uncle sam to hold me down? He didn't give me financial aid. Mr. Banker didn't hold me down. I got a loan for college.

People never want to look in the mirror and realize that no one owes you help you in this world-unless you find someone kind enough to be willing to do so. People always want to look to some higher power helping them or keeping them down. It's always the big bad banker or politicion keeping them unsuccessful. It's god who helped me. There's any number of examples, of someone always "blaming" something bigger instead of personal responsibility.

[mare]

This is a very interesting discussion and I must say I agree a lot with what both sides of the main contributors to the bulk of this argument are saying.

And that cooperative spirit you describe is fantastic, why weren't you describing it earlier? Why did you focus on talking about the welfare-**** and lazy-good-for-nothings? These hypothetical straw-men and personal anecdotes don't seem to--at all--represent the "pay it forward" attitude you're stating as your goal. And the reason i pick apart your motivational quotes is because they can already be applied to the class of people who you seem to think need them. If the things you state as being important to you are actually the case, then you could easily find many commonalities with any of these protestors.

This however, I do not agree with. While I realize full-well that holding this inherent tinge of cynicism and means of gross-generalization, supplemented by one's own personal history or anecdotes, if you will, can lead to a quite subjective stance on this issue; I must say that this is not entirely out of line, nor are these situations BrentMusburger is describing hypothetical. I may have misunderstood or be totally off-point here, but it seems to me you don't feel personal anecdotes such as these represent actual society? I can offer quite a few anecdotes of my own, but I doubt this would change your mind. Again, I realize what I have witnessed in my life has made me cynical and quite apprehensive to the sharing of wealth, and as a man of science I am constantly evaluating whether this type of thinking is just or not. I am still not sure. However, I do know with quite a degree of certainty that there is a real problem in this country with the way money is spent, a problem that is in GROSS disproportion to the rest of the western-world. Certainly we are all guilty of this on varying levels, however, by and large it is utterly out of control in America. If you want to deny this and believe the kinks will just sort themselves out with a sudden vast overhaul of our economic system and policies, then this thinking is just as arbitrary as believing the: "that's just the way it is, why change it?" train of thought.

We can look to socialist (if you want to call it that) societies in Europe and say "well, why not here," but that train of thought is entirely too simplistic. Bottom line is, there are far too many cultural and socio-economic institutions in place that make our country FAR different than countries like Germany, France, UK etc. and a sudden massive overhaul of our economic system to something that would reflect theirs, just would not work. On a side note, I am not really sure if these are their demands but frankly, their demands are quite unclear.

Here's a small example, you want to ride the city train in Stuttgart, Germany? Buy a ticket and get on, or don't buy a ticket and still get on. Everyone buys a ticket. There are no barriers of entry to get on the train. You risk the small (very small) chance of a ticket agent being on the train asking for tickets, but I have never once seen one and I have rode a lot of trains in Germany (all legally of course!). If you can honestly ask yourself if this would work in any major city in America and find the answer to be yes, you need a reality-check.

All of this being said, I agree to some degree with the protesters. Our economic-system needs to be tweaked. I don't think this is the right way to do it and i think a lot of them (not all) are idiots. I would even be so inclined to say the aggregate of them are sheep and don't know what the hell they are really doing or what exactly their demands are, but I guess the more warm bodies, the stronger the movement. If you want to deny this and pretend that the big bad media is just focusing on these loud incoherent individuals that we see daily videos of, I guess you would have a valid argument. The loudest people are usually the dumbest. If you feel so strongly for their cause, why are you not out there with them. This thread is bursting at the seams with so much "intellect," why not make your voice heard and attempt to counter-balance all the buffoonery we are exposed to on a daily basis?

P.s. Not that it really matters at all, I am not sure what the perks are that come with a positive rating or "rep," but are people seriously negative-voting someone (ie: BrentMusburger) for contributing a contradictory view-point? He's not being crude or caustic at all...but hey, god bless America and freedom of ideology right?

[Sym]

I can understand your rebuttal in favor of anecdotes, and my sentence structure could have perhaps been clearer; but I have no issue against personal anecdotes, nor did I call his anecdotes hypothetical. If you reference my sentence you'll see I discussed personal anecdotes as well as hypothetical straw-men all within a context of their seeming counter to a 'pay it forward' perspective on life and investigating why that was (to which i've been genuinely and adequately answered). There are, in fact, lots of things personal anecdotes can do for an individual or group but their service as fuel for debate is minimal.

I can't discuss an interaction with Joe Blow who took his government-issued scooter and sold it for cash. Short of me going and finding Mr. Blow's receipts that statement is not up for debate. I take you at your word. At the same time, however, a personal anecdote would be better brought alongside statistical or systematic evidence to show one's own anecdote is applicable ~outside~ personal experience. I've yet to see that. And backing up an anecdote with discussion of cultural trends and nebulous personal values makes a far cry from backing up a position with data. I'm willing to have--and confident in--a debate in either arena, but I think it would be beneficial for us to put forward something we can, genuinely and without knee-capping, debate.

I currently work in property and casualty insurance as an agent, renters/homeowners insurance is part of that. Prior to my job as an agent I worked in retail for home decor. All together it's just over a decade of work-experience with home owners. My retail job didn't give me an insight into this mess before it happened; all I saw was a huge slump in customers between 05-06, culminating in the national credit slumps in 07. By then I was already in insurance, and my time since then has included a long string of stories from people whose lives and livelihoods were turned upside-down by this. And it hasn't stopped.

Two weeks ago I worked with a man who was going to remove his homeowners policy because his family had abandoned their home. Bought his house under an ARM in 01, switched to a fixed rate in 05 or 06 (can't perfectly remember), laid off in late 2010, by this time he was underwater by more than double on the value at his switch, kept things together via part-time jobs throughout the rest of 2010 into 2011 until his son was diagnosed with an illness I can't remember exactly but had something to do with meningitis(?) (not to seem callous, but when you hear as many personal tales as I do you tend to just focus on the emotional content so that you can empathize more genuinely. Plus I wasn't intending to use him as an anecdote at the time). In any case due to the repeal of KidsCare (our state's CHIP program), and the fact that his part time work put him over the medicaid limit but kept him off any health insurance at his employers, he took the money he would have put towards his mortgage and put it into medical payments. After a few months of that, well, it was time to leave the house. Owned the house for a decade, made his payments without issue, but then a quick succession of bad luck events pushed him out.

His story is pretty poignant, but the reason I bring up this anecdote was because I never heard him say anything other than the facts. He didn't appeal to my emotions or ask for any sympathy, he exhibited lots of traits that would be right alongside any 'by-your-bootstraps' disciple. He didn't tell me his story as a sob-story, or for pity; he told me because I asked him what was going on (it's a general rule to ask for more information when we learn someone wants to cancel a policy or do something drastic like this). I can guarantee you wouldn't find him at OWS, but I can also guarantee that he is affected by this crisis in a way that should not have even happened if the system was insulated and transparent enough to protect against systemic risk.

At any point along his example there could have been something in place to stop his downward spiral. If bust-cycle pressures affected the housing market and stayed there, it would have allowed a man underwater on his home to keep it and merely tough it out until brighter days. Or further on, allowing a man who does lose his job from the crisis to find another one in a sector not affected by the crisis. Or further-further on, allowing a man's son to get affordable medical care ,via the state he lives in and contributes to, without having to sacrifice other necessary payments. But at each level there was a failure, and I think I can adequately argue that the failure wasn't a personal one.

Sliced-up and multiplied subprime CDO's and shadow market CDS's (and i use this as a low-hanging-fruit example)--whose players made up every major investment bank in America--should have been transparent and rated honestly according to their risk, allowing institutions to keep their credit flowing without fear of collapse in its partners and recognizing when agencies and investors are shorting institutions via default swap hedges. When a financial institution takes a block of mortgages with subprimes, chops it up among its tranches, then takes those blocks and combines them into another set of tranches (CDO) then takes those CDO's and combines them into another set of tranches (etc etc) and then gets them ALL rated AAA how can any reasonable person look at the absolute bottom of that mess and point the finger there?

That shit doesn't happen because poor people buy more expensive houses than they can afford. That shit happens because institutions who are trusted and paid to avert risk and maximize profit are given carte blanche power with the world's money and no meaningful oversight to keep them honest or even visible. subprime mortgages increased because at the end of the financial food chain they could rate all those as AAA investment-worthy vehicles without so much as a raised eyebrow and slice off ridiculous profits via fees due to their 'complexity' all the way down to the mortgage lender/broker who got them to sign on the dotted line. Simply put, people were taken advantage of.

And the worst part is that when the damage should have been over, with subprime lenders being excised, likely defaulting, and the resulting obligations paid out, it kept going because no one could tell where the subprimes were and the people who crafted these didn't want them to see that they made up roughly one third of their assets. So rates went up-> pushing more (viable) homes into the red-zone-> pushing more defaults into the cdo's-> pushing more uncertainty into where the next bomb would drop-> pushing banks to just start writing down their MBA's as losses and *POOF* Lehman Brothers is straight up gone, Merril Lynch, Bear Stearns, and Wachovia are all bought in fire sales, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are converted to bank holders to receive stimulus money and avert their ~own~ fire sales and thus the beginning of a complete financial confidence crisis takes shape. We've seen the effect of that confidence crisis push into pretty much every sector of the economy as well as into government who (as the financial system's deus ex machina) shouldered the mess left by our economic system via bailouts and stimulus.

So, ultimately, the moral of the story i'm trying to put forward here is that personal values can only inform and shield us as far as our own personal reach, at some point the rest of the system takes over. There aren't enough poor-people-buying-houses-they-can't-afford on the PLANET to kill the amount of money that pushed through our financial system on a daily basis. But it happened. And it continues to strike me in my work and in my reading that by absolutely no controllable fault of my own, ~I~ could have been that guy on the phone. By mere luck of the draw I have no debt obligations, no family obligations, no home to own, and work in a sector that will never die so long as fear exists (and boy have we had it in spades for these past few years).

Basically, i was young enough at the time to fly under the radar. But in my own case i'm not a big proponent of relying on luck. Nor am I willing to rely on my continued success and personal will, because a lot of successful underwriters and financial innovaters--people with seemingly superhuman levels of will--have been culled by this crisis as well, not to mention driven blue-collar men and women who've been swept up at the edges of these affected systems. My mind and experience compels me to seek out a safe and moderately risk-free system I can live in and enjoy that living.

It just so happens I don't consider our current system that safe. And as I've immersed myself in the financial system we have in place it's just become more and more plain to me that the 'game' is rigged in america's favor and that rigging depends on sharing power and prosperity(safety) with fewer and fewer people. That, in my opinion, is a different discussion but one that I think the OWS movement seems to facilitate. For that reason, it has my support.

[BrentMusburger]

The problem with AAA credit ratings like the ones on these instruments was that they were justified at the time. With home prices increasing, payment WAS practically gaurenteed. The debt service could be met. Until it can't be. Then all hell breaks loose. There's no slow transition to see "oh this is going bad, let's downgrade". One day it's smooth sailing. The next, you're finished. Poof.

I agree with you that many people are to blame. However, I will not excuse the average American for one second. They bought bigger and better houses than they could afford. They cashed out on equity to buy boats, fund educations, go on vacations, and live the high life. Every one ate it up because it was good for basically every sector for a few decades. The American style of economic empire was so effective that it gutted our own nation and left us a pathetic shell. We killed the golden goose and have sown the seeds of our own collapse. We rely on housing games to keep up our standard of living at the expense of others around the world. When the dream pops, we took the rest of the world down with us. The only thing that's keeping this sham afloat, and from people being able to see the true rot, is the ability to print more money.

It just so happens I don't consider our current system that safe. And as I've immersed myself in the financial system we have in place it's just become more and more plain to me that the 'game' is rigged in america's favor and that rigging depends on sharing power and prosperity(safety) with fewer and fewer people. That, in my opinion, is a different discussion but one that I think the OWS movement seems to facilitate. For that reason, it has my support.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... a&aid=3482

US economic hegemony in this distorted Dollar System increasingly depends on a rising rate of support from the rest of the world to sustain US debt levels. Like the old Sorcerers' Apprentice. But the point is past where this can be gotten easily. That is the real significance of the US shift to unilateralism and military threats as foreign policy. Europe can no longer be given a piece of the Third World debt pie as in the 1980's. Japan has to cough up even more, as does China now.

Even ordinary Americans have to give up their pension promises. If the Dollar System is to remain hegemonic, it must find major new sources of support. That spells likely destabilization and wars for the rest of the world.

[scorch-]

CAN YOU ALL STOP IT ALREADY PLEASE.